From Emergence

Discussions and articles regarding emergence within complex systems.

Contents 1 News 2 The Story so far ... 3 Resources 4 Notes 5 Projects 5.1 Theoretical Framework 5.2 Systems Model 5.3 Structure Analysis

News

• 2010-02-01 Start-of-Year: The Emergence Group will reconvene this month. On the cards is an introductory presentation about emergence.
• 2009-12-05 End-of-Year: The Emergence Group will be celebrating the end of 2009
• 2009-08-01 HPC: Intel gives a course on multicore programming
• 2008-12-19 End-of-Year: The Emergence Group will be celebrating the end of 2008 and setting up some goals for 2009.
• 2008-11-15 HPC : The Emergence Group core members will be attending a round table discussion on software development for HPC in South Africa.
• 2008-04-10 Main : The Emergence Group site is now open to the community.

The Story so far ...

• What is emergence, what are its origins and related fields?
• Why does emergence have cross-discipline applications and what is its relationship with complex systems?

Complexity, self-organisation, dynamical systems, evolution, creativity, sociology. What ties these together - emergence.

The term emergence has been used loosely across all these fields, clearly describing on the same concept in all cases, but without drawing on a well defined definition. In trying to pin down the ideas, there is a long history in which many authors have tended to start by drawing on the concepts of novelty. This has quickly lead to the need for introducing the role of the observer in understanding the nature of emergence. While this avenue has lead to a diverse set of examples it still seems to elude the formulation of a rigorous definition.

Taking a less anthropomorphic approach, many formulations have hinged on the concept of emergent properties. The principle being that the systems of interest are those in which aggregate behaviour is an inherent part of the system as a whole, rather than any one part of the system e.g. waves or heat. Again, this is an import aspect of the emergence, yet it seems unable to capture the depth of the complexity inherent in many complex systems.

Thus, a fundamental problem of studying emergence has been trying to detect the occurrence of emergence in an objective manner. One promising avenue seems to be to shift the focus of study to one of investigating the structures that are intrinsic to the computational properties of complex systems. That is, there is a need to incorporate the concept of emergent structure into a theoretical formulation of emergence.

With this last concept in mind, the ultimate intention is to understand how structure forms within a complex system by following a process that is driven by two key concepts:

• the formulation of a well defined framework, and a computational realisation of this framework
• the development of tools and mechanisms for analysing structure of systems cast within this framework.

Both the framework and its machinery need to be supported by empirical experimentation and tied back to real world phenomena.

Resources

• Papers - Abstract and Review
• Research Groups
• Books and Journals
• Links
• People

Notes

• Concepts
• Commentaries
• Minutes

Projects

Theoretical Framework

Ultimately we wish to develop a working model describing the process of emergence. The first step towards this goal, is to provide a well defined problem domain. In order to achieve this we need a theoretical framework that encompasses explicit definitions of the artifacts under study, together with the types of interactions and operations that are being captured. From this we should be able to start describing approximations of the processes that are taking place in systems that exhibit emergence.

However, the difficulty with emergence is one of finding the right level for these definitions. That is, a level simple enough to work with, yet does not unwittingly include the results of emergence a priori.

It is for this reason that we have chosen to rely on a simple definition of complex systems, namely, as a group of concurrently interacting independent entities. Furthermore, the structure of the system is to be treated as an explicitly decoupled property. The framework will then need to provide machinery that links changes in structure back to the underlying dynamics in the system.

Additionally, the framework will need to be able to be linked back to empirical evidence from observable systems by accounting for concepts such as: open systems, closure, boundary formation, integration and differentiation, etc.

Systems Model

One of the difficulties in studying emergence is, ironically, the complexity. More specifically, these systems generally consist of large numbers of interacting entities that are acting concurrently. Instead of trying to only work directly with naturally occurring systems, we feel that it would be beneficial to develop a simple abstract model that captures the essence of the underlying mechanisms of complex systems.

Thus we wish to develop a framework and notation that can be used to express the internal dynamics of simple complex systems. In essence our approach is to develop a fully functional software programming language that captures all of the essential traits of complex systems.

Models of systems can then be built using this representation. With this ability it will be easier to introduce tools that enable us to observe and manipulate the dynamics of the system without disrupting it to the point where its functioning breaks down.

This would provide a simpler and more manageable environment for studying the processes leading to emergent structure.

Structure Analysis

Develop tools and well defined mechanisms for uncovering and representing the structure that is inherent in existing complex systems. At a computational level this will build on the systems model which will be used to represent the system under study.

More specifically, we intend to develop the ability to analyse the way in which state changes occur in complex systems, and whether the computational operations within subsystems exhibit closure over these state changes. This intention is to show that this information regarding closure is equivalent to finding structure within the system.